"The Staying Local Indicator is based on statistical analysis of anonymised, aggregated, mobile phone activity records."

Gas. I've spent the last 2 years trying to get access to my own records from these datasets - @DPCIreland said I had no right to access my own data. https://twitter.com/CSOIreland/status/1349672914736586752

In case you don't know how insidious the Data Retention regime in Ireland is - look no further than how @CSOIreland used this data. During the current pandemic, it can tell you exactly who has likely committed an offence by breaking the travel restrictions.

The EU Courts have ruled time and time again that the data retention regime in Ireland is excessive and unlawful, but regardless it has persisted, for annoying reasons we won't get into here. See @klillington and @DRIalerts important work on this subject https://www.digitalrights.ie/irish-surveillance-documents/

It amounts to mass surveillance of every man, woman and child who carries a mobile phone in Ireland - where they go, who they contact and when. When combining the entire population's records in one dataset like the @CSOIreland have, you can conduct even more invasive analysis.

In December 2018, I made a Subject Access Request under GDPR to @VodafoneIreland to request access to the metadata records they retain about me (they're required to retain records on *everyone* under Communications (Retention of Data) Act 2011.

Vodafone refused to give me a copy of my own data; I complained to @DPCIreland - who agreed with Vodafone (surprise). Then @DPCIreland stonewalled me for a year and a half - completely denying me my right to appeal their decision.

You see, the @DPCIreland 's logic here is that if they never ever make a formal decision, no-one can actually appeal it.

So that's the story of how @DPCIreland decided that citizens can't even access a copy of their own mobile phone location data, while the @CSOIreland can get an entire database dump of *everyone's* mobile phone location data. Cool cool cool.

It's a very long, ongoing story which I'll write up some day, but the @DPCIreland obstruction of my complaint was pretty astonishing

In the end, I hired a solicitor, and after a few months of ignoring his letters, the @DPCIreland silently directed Vodafone to give me a copy of my data which I got just before Christmas. Well, 50% of it . They decided to redact the incoming calls and say I'm not entitled

to those records. And so we'll do the dance again. I'm now going to be using the "Geographic Positions" in my records to create an art visualisation of how Data Retention maps my life:

Having manually looked through a few of them - it's remarkable how much my life is mapped from this information - where I live, where I work, some medical/highly personal details. I don't even use calls/SMS much, and yet you can tell a *lot* about me from these records.

All this info is available to Gardaí, Defence Forces and Revenue Commissioners *without any warrant required*.

Now imagine if you combined my records with my friends' records, my coworkers' records, the entire country's records? The correlations you can do would be astonishing.